History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communicationsfrom the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network

CS Miniaby Bill Glover

CS MINIA

Built in 1866 by London and Glasgow Company,
Glasgow.

Length 328.5 ft. Breadth 35.8 ft. Depth 25.1 ft. Gross
tonnage 2,061.

Chartered for three years by the Telegraph Construction
and Maintenance Company in 1871 and converted for cable work. Sold by
her owners in 1874 to the Anglo American Telegraph Company and used for
cable repair duties. Leased to Western Union in 1912, remaining in service
until 1922 when sold for scrap.

With CS Mackay Bennett, Minia was one of the ships which recovered bodies after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. In 2012 the History Detectives, a well-regarded program on public television in the USA, investigated an oak portrait frame which the family believed was made from wood from the Titanic recovered by their great-grandfather, CS Minia's Second Engineer, Francis Tierney.

The Atlantic Cable website is pleased to have been able to help with the research on this project. The link above has further information, including a video of the investigation and its conclusions, and images of a moving letter from Minia written during the recovery voyage by radio operator Francis Dyke.

The Atlantic Cable website is non-commercial,
and its mission is to make available on line
as much information as possible.

You can help - if you have cable material,
old or new, please contact me. Cable samples, instruments, documents,
brochures, souvenir books, photographs,
family stories, all are valuable to
researchers and historians.

If you have any cable-related items
that you could photograph, copy,
scan, loan,
or sell, please email me: billb@ftldesign.com